Estimating the lagged effect of price discounting: a time-series study on sugar sweetened beverage purchasing in a supermarket.

Background: Price discount is an unregulated obesogenic environmental risk factor for the purchasing of unhealthy food, including Sugar Sweetened Beverages (SSB). Sales of price discounted food items are known to increase during the period of discounting. However, the presence and extent of the lagged effect of discounting, a sustained level of sales after discounting ends, is previously unaccounted for.

Generating community measures of food purchasing activities using store-level electronic grocery transaction records: an ecological study in Montreal, Canada.

Objective: Geographic measurement of diets is generally not available at areas smaller than a national or provincial (state) scale, as existing nutrition surveys cannot achieve sample sizes needed for an acceptable statistical precision for small geographic units such as city subdivisions.

Design: Using geocoded Nielsen grocery transaction data collected from supermarket, supercentre and pharmacy chains combined with a gravity model that transforms store-level sales into area-level purchasing, we developed small-area public health indicators of food purchasing for neighbourhood districts. We generated the area-level indicators measuring per-resident purchasing quantity for soda, diet soda, flavoured (sugar-added) yogurt and plain yogurt purchasing.

Price discounting as a hidden risk factor of energy drink consumption.

Objectives: Global consumption of caffeinated energy drinks (CED) has been increasing dramatically despite increasing evidence of their adverse health effects. Temporary price discounting is a rarely investigated but potentially powerful food marketing tactic influencing purchasing of CED. Using grocery transaction records generated by food stores in Montreal, we investigated the association between price discounting and purchasing of CED across socio-economic status operationalized by education and income levels in store neighbourhood.

Application of Machine Learning and Grocery Transaction Data to Forecast Effectiveness of Beverage Taxation.

Sugar Sweetened Beverages (SSB) are the primary source of artificially added sugar and have a casual association with chronic diseases. Taxation of SSB has been proposed, but limited evidence exists to guide this public health policy. Grocery transaction data, with price, discounting and other information for beverage products, present an opportunity to evaluate the likely effects of taxation policy.

An Area-Level Indicator of Latent Soda Demand: Spatial Statistical Modeling of Grocery Store Transaction Data to Characterize the Nutritional Landscape in Montreal, Canada.

Measurement of neighborhood dietary patterns at high spatial resolution allows public health agencies to identify and monitor communities with an elevated risk of nutrition-related chronic diseases. Currently, data on diet are obtained primarily through nutrition surveys, which produce measurements at low spatial resolutions. The availability of store-level grocery transaction data provides an opportunity to refine the measurement of neighborhood dietary patterns.

Susceptibility to price discounting of soda by neighbourhood educational status: an ecological analysis of disparities in soda consumption using point-of-purchase transaction data in Montreal, Canada.

Introduction: Price discounting is a marketing tactic used frequently by food industries and retailers, but the extent to which education modifies the effect of discounting on the purchasing of unhealthy foods has received little attention. We investigated whether there was a differential association of price discounting of soda with store-level soda purchasing records between 2008 and 2013 by store-neighbourhood education in Montreal, Canada.

Methods: Using data on grocery purchase transactions from a sample of supermarkets, pharmacies, supercentres and convenience stores, we performed an ecological time-series analysis, modelling weekly store-level sales of soda as a function of store-level price discounting, store- and neighbourhood-level confounders and an interaction term between discounting and categorical education in the neighbourhood of each store.

A novel application of point-of-sales grocery transaction data to enhance community nutrition monitoring.

Unhealthy eating is the most important preventable cause of global death and disability. Effective development and evaluation of preventive initiatives and the identification of disparities in dietary patterns require surveillance of nutrition at a community level. However, nutrition monitoring currently relies on dietary surveys, which cannot efficiently assess food selection at high spatial resolution.

Montreal Accord on Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs) use series - Paper 5: patient-reported outcomes can be linked to epidemiologic measures to monitor populations and inform public health decisions.

Background: A comprehensive picture of population health status can be captured by the incorporation of patient-reported outcome measures into population health monitoring.

Objective: The aim of the study was to identify the current state, opportunities, and future research related to the utilization of patient-reported outcome measures for population health monitoring in Canada.

Discussions: Patient-reported outcome measures can help to identify community health needs in public health topics including injury, chronic disease, and communicable disease.

Food insecurity and low CD4 count among HIV-infected people: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Food insecurity is defined as a limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways, or limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods. While effective antiretroviral treatment can significantly increase CD4 counts in the majority of patients, there are certain populations who remain at relatively low CD4 count levels. Factors possibly associated with poor CD4 recovery have been extensively studied, but the association between food insecurity and low CD4 count is inconsistent in the literature.

From Cues to Nudge: A Knowledge-Based Framework for Surveillance of Healthcare-Associated Infections.

We propose an integrated semantic web framework consisting of formal ontologies, web services, a reasoner and a rule engine that together recommend appropriate level of patient-care based on the defined semantic rules and guidelines. The classification of healthcare-associated infections within the HAIKU (Hospital Acquired Infections - Knowledge in Use) framework enables hospitals to consistently follow the standards along with their routine clinical practice and diagnosis coding to improve quality of care and patient safety. The HAI ontology (HAIO) groups over thousands of codes into a consistent hierarchy of concepts, along with relationships and axioms to capture knowledge on hospital-associated infections and complications with focus on the big four types, surgical site infections (SSIs), catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI); hospital-acquired pneumonia, and blood stream infection.

Towards probabilistic decision support in public health practice: predicting recent transmission of tuberculosis from patient attributes.

Objective: Investigating the contacts of a newly diagnosed tuberculosis (TB) case to prevent TB transmission is a core public health activity. In the context of limited resources, it is often necessary to prioritize investigation when multiple cases are reported. Public health personnel currently prioritize contact investigation intuitively based on past experience.

Analytical performance of norovirus real-time RT-PCR detection protocols in Canadian laboratories.

Background: Noroviruses (NoVs) are the leading cause of infectious gastroenteritis worldwide. Real-time reverse transcription PCR (real-time RT-PCR) is the preferred method of NoV detection for the majority of testing laboratories. Although the accepted target region for molecular detection assays is the conserved ORF1/ORF2 junction, multiple variations have been published with differences in primers, probes, reagents, multiplexing, etc.